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Weighty Matters: 'Gravity Ghost' Preview, PAX, Preorder

After the argument over whether Gone Home was, strictly speaking a game (spoilers: it’s a game engine, as Dan Pinchbeck would say), it’s nice to see an indie game based so uncompromisingly around a core mechanic.

Gravity Ghost, which was made available for preorder on Monday, is the kind of tobacco-chewing, no-nonsense game that lays it all out in the title, like any real core gamer product. Doom? You will be doomed. Rage? You will experience rage. S.T.A.L.K.E.R? You are S.T.A.L.King things. Gravity Ghost? You are a ghost. You are affected by gravity.

That’s it. And if you’re the kind of politically correct Poindexter who will get offended by a real gamer’s game, then Gravity Ghost is not for you. It takes focus, dedication, and a commitment to gaming to focus past the intentional distractions – that your character is an adorable young ghost lady, searching for her cute ghost fox companion who probably just loves and misses her so much - and tear into the raw, veiny muscle of the physics-based 2D gameplay beneath.

OK. I am starting to regret my earlier statements. On reflection, this may be less unremittingly butch than I first thought.

Music of the spheres

QuirkyQuirky characters and papercraft aesthetics aside, Gravity Ghost offers a beguilingly pure gaming experience. Your character, the ghost, lives in a St. Exupéryish world of tiny planetoids. Each of them has a gravity well, as does the ghost herself. By rotating around the spheres clockwise or anti-clockwise, and then pushing away, she can leave the surface and glide through space in graceful loops, with her arc affected by the player’s three direction keys – clockwise, anticlockwise and jump – and the pull of other objects. It’s a 2D orbiter rather than a 2D platformer, in essence. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku’s description of Gravity Ghost as a “little indie Mario Galaxy that could” speaks more to the concept and star-collecting mechanic than to the overall game, but the spiritual relation can definitely be traced.

Each level, representing one solar system in a range of odd constellations, has a door and a key. The objective in each case is to find that key – which may be static or mobile, inside a planetoid or floating free – and open the door. That’s it. Collected stars can be used to unlock new constellations, with new solar systems.

Complicating matters slightly are the planetoids, which have a range of special characteristics. Some are icy, and hard to stay anchored to. Others are made of glass, and break if the ghost hits them at high speed. Some are bouncy… and so on.

Map of the heavens: if you get stuck on a level, the escape key takes you straight back to this selection screen. You utter, utter casual.

Made by Ivy Games, a small studio headed by designer and artist Erin Robinson, Gravity Ghost layers complexity gently over its initially simple gameplay.

It is never impossible – there are no time limits, no deaths and no unwinnable positions – but it adds elements along a gentle curve, and introduces secondary objectives – freeing captive planets by rotating them through mazes using the ghost’s own gravity, and solving speed challenges to waken the guardians of each constellation.

The build I played was missing some of the story elements, but there is a dreamy, fantastical feel to it – the “Icarus System” at the heart of the galaxy is slowly (re)populated by celestial avatars, unable to see their savior as she whooshes benignly past them.

In short, it’s a game - as it happens, a cute, all-ages-friendly game, but one with a relaxing set of rhythms of its own, a terrific soundtrack by Ben (FTL) Prunty and the promise of hours of physics-based puzzling for its target audience.

It isn’t perfect – the loops of the ghost’s travel are hard to predict with confidence on crowded maps, leading sometimes to a trial-and-error approach. This is exacerbated by the game’s zooming, which smartly pulls out further as the ghost’s orbit grows larger. However, this does mean that when anchored to a surface the close zoom makes aiming for the star a test of memory as well as mathematics. These are fairly minor issues, however, and the game is still being tweaked.

Gravity Ghost will be showing at the Indie Megabooth as PAX this weekend, for those who are going, and Robinson and her team will be handing out inevitably whimsical swag. If you are in the area, it might be an enjoyable world to drop into.

Notes: I played a pre-release build of the game on a Windows PC, which was largely feature-complete but lacking certain narrative elements. Gravity Ghost will be released for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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